9 Kinds of Intelligence

 The Value of Practical Skills and …

 Whether you learn these in the home, at school, on the job, or experimenting on your own or with others, practical skills are a life-long asset.  All definitely have a biological basis – health, body shape, class and color caste background, gender and national origin to start.  As Marx put it, the apparent contradiction between so-called 'mental' skills and physical skills, while both are related, should be overcome.  And they are in the labor process.

Learning how to do basic wood working, electrical and plumbing, assembly and mechanics will save you money over a lifetime and perhaps provide a living.  Learning how to cook, sew, organize, understand medicines and the body, exercise and clean are also essential.  Repairing broken items is a necessary skill, which means trouble-shooting, trial and error and some knowledge of how things work in various areas.  Understanding a broad array of tools is also key. This now extends to software, computers, many electronic devices and other practical items. Marx understood this as 'concrete labor.'

Problem solving stretches across all human activity and might even be the most important skill for any job, approaching what he called 'abstract labor' - the essence of labor power.  This concept of work stretches into problems between people and even within a person. This relates to the concept of the 9 kinds of intelligence, not the simplified and erroneous 'one' kind promoted by IQ tests, MENSA and narrow academics.   As we know, sometimes people with J.D’s, M.A’s or Ph.D’s are stupid in some ways, while relatively uneducated people have touches of genius. 

Here is a list of 9 kinds of intelligence.  The idea is to improve in all of these areas if you can.  This list was developed by Howard Gardener, a Harvard psychologist:

 1. Visual-spatial intelligence – Understanding maps, blueprints, schematics, sizes and shapes, physical reality, etc.

2. Linguistic-verbal intelligence - Verbal, written and language skills.

3. Mathematical intelligence – Logic, abstraction, reason.

4. Kinesthetic intelligence – Physical understanding of the world – athletes, dancers, physical workers.  Sometimes called physical intelligence.

5. Musical intelligence – the ability to create, play, recognize, grow in sophistication or enjoy music.

6. Intrapersonal intelligence – The ability to work with others and read people, even making them laugh.  Sometimes known as emotional intelligence.  

7. Interpersonal intelligence – The ability to understand yourself, your body, manage feelings, have achievable goals and know how you come across to others.

8. Naturalistic intelligence – The recognition and understanding of plants, animals, growth and the natural world – like the weather, seasons, signs, growing crops, etc.

9. Existential intelligence – The ability to understand the forces behind 'reality' - to have an accurate 'big picture' of what is going on. 

(Based on definitions from Practical Psychology, 10/6/2023)

They are not all centered in the brain...

Most people have some of these skills, which are all forms of labor.  It is the definition of a “Renaissance Person” to be really good at many. One that might be missing here is a 10., Artistic intelligence – which might combine some of these other skills but apply more broadly.  Some artists excel across the board in music, painting, poetry, etc.  And I might ask, where does 'planning' fit in?  Some people can't think ahead for 5 minutes, or their plans change constantly. They live chaotically.  A math skill? 

As you can see this theory explains why a scientist might not know how to drive a car and has multiple accidents.  Or explains a musician or sports star who is inarticulate, as there are plenty of those.  Or a carpenter who has anger-management problems.  Or a philosopher who looks at a forest and can't specifically recognize anything.  Or a dancer who is an obnoxious prima donna.  Or the accountant with a meth addiction.  Or a nurse that gets easily lost. Or the farmer that lives day-to-day.  We all have some level of all of these skills but no one has them all.  Sadly, some people have very few of any.

Here we get to the question of how people are 'educated' by the family, the school system, the streets, the society, the class structure, the economy.  A person who is always late might have bad transport, a drug or alcohol problem, live in their own inner world or be under stress - so social forces impact intelligence.  Not news.  Basic and prior to education is biological health, which remains problematic in much of the world.  That is a whole 'nother issue. 

The main force for proletarians and farmers under capitalism is how to survive, i.e. how to earn some kind of living if you are not a trust-fund baby or living on inherited wealth.  Subsistence farmers have to have very high levels of natural intelligence, as do most farmers across the board.  But it is also true that a job does not designate your intelligence, as we know many people who do not fit their jobs.  Like a bookstore owner that doesn't read.  Or a factory worker who is clumsy and wrecks what they work on.  Or the tech coder who can't balance a checkbook.  Or the lawyer that steals from his clients. Or the 'green' capitalist that ruins the environment.  Though for the latter that can come with the territory and might just show a certain 'math' intelligence. 

Right-wingers think that the only intelligence skills to be taught are job skills needed by corporations or small businessmen. For some small businesses, the key is knowing how to keep track of time – for some people a lost math and space skill.  Knowing how to do simple math, basic reading and have physical strength is enough to get that person hired in many of these jobs.  This is why many small businessmen sneer at more developed forms of education.  The Republican Party, while being funded by a sector of billionaires, has a base among these small business people and farmers, who are their prime voting cattle. 

For corporations, the skills range upward, especially due to the increasing complexity of labor in a white-collar environment.  A rude or crude co-worker will usually not last long unless they have achieved boss status.  Someone who cannot solve problems will not last long.  Someone with an aversion to software will not last long.   If you can't take sitting in a cube, drinking corporate coffee and taking orders, you won't last long.  The favored 'intelligence' for survival as a worker is that of adaptability and fitting into the goals of the owner in both kinds of jobs.  Aargh... wage slavery's emotional intelligence quotient.

This latter white-collar strata is favored by the Democratic Party as voters because the corporations in the Democrat's corner understand the need to go beyond physical strength, Bible thumping and the basic 3Rs. Even now so-called physical jobs require tech understanding  – mechanics, plumbers, machinists, rail workers, postal workers, truck drivers, soldiers, etc.  “Education” is the Democrat's mantra, especially under Obama, as if unemployment could be solved by re-education.  It isn't. 

“Working for yourself” as a sub-contractor, 'gig' or temp worker, small business person or 'independent' contractor is then proffered as the alternative to the banalities of being an employee.  But in a society and an economy no one is really independent and all these people eventually find that out.  There are degrees of independence, with the big capitalists having the most freedom, though they are also trapped in the parameters of profit. 

Post-modern architecture that ages like a Bad Tattoo

Marxists, unlike post-modernists and other short-term thinkers, have an accurate big picture of the world economy – how workers holistically reproduce and survive based on labor.  So they perhaps excel at #9.  Practical skills are pragmatic, but they also can lend themselves to #9.  Multiple forms of intelligence also play a role in aiding #9. 

Post-modernism posits that the world is made up of disconnected bits and pieces – a poppy, loose mosaic without a frame and no 'big picture.'  Straight bourgeois ideology ignores the economy and proclaims empiricism, 'realism' and pragmatism.  These are ideologies that allow one to fit into the present economic 'frame' without wondering about the gold-fish bowl you are swimming in.  Religious ideologies are mostly based on faith and upbringing and do not need real-world confirmation, so they are usually excellent methods for a false ‘big picture’ understanding of the world.  Liberal religionists still hold to a moral code of some sort, yet separate from any economic understanding except forms of charity, including government charity.  

Most people patch together a series of influences, a personalist variety of bits and pieces, a satisfying emotional patchwork to make sense of the world.  As a result of this kind of dispersal many 'schools of thought' have gone or are going by the wayside – positivism, idealism, Existentialism, liberalism, market fundamentalism, deep ecology, surrealism and even many religious traditions. Capitalist 'realism' seems to have won.  Libertarianism seems to be having a moment, as does paganism and identitarianism.  And then there is fascism, which is a patchwork of emotions, upbringing, class position, violence and irrationality – the ultimate post-modern method of destruction.

Whatever the level of these 9 kinds of intelligence, it seems to be an excellent way of approaching the issue of working intelligence, able to explain what we see every day.  Calling someone ‘stupid’ is only the beginning… 

Prior blog reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “From the Factory to the Metropolis” (Negri); “Deep Survival,” “Anti-fascism, Sports, Sobriety” (Kuhn); “Sometimes A Great Notion” (Kesey); “The Making of the English Working Class” (Thompson); “Divergent-Insurgent,” “A Terrible Thing to Waste” or “artificial intelligence.”

 The Cultural Marxist / July 1, 2024